Free Little Mercies by Heather Gudenkauf

nearby. “Hon,” she says. “I have some paperwork for you to fill out.” With a shaky hand I write down Avery’s name and birth date and am struck by the thought that the entirety of my daughter’s life only takes up two lines on a medical form. I take the paperwork to the window and hand it to the woman. “When do you think I’ll hear something?” I ask, biting the corners of cheeks to stop from crying.
    She shakes her head, her jowls bobbing with the movement. “I don’t know, hon.” I wish she would stop calling me that. “I’ll check in with a nurse.” She reaches out and touches my hand before I turn to walk away. “Do you have someone to wait with you? Would you like for me to call someone?”
    “No, thank you,” I say coolly, pulling my hand away. The receptionist looks at me, first with bewilderment and then with suspicion. I know she thinks I’m acting oddly for a parent whose daughter has been brought near death into the emergency room. She thinks that I am acting exactly the way the kind of woman who would leave her daughter in a boiling van would act. Inexplicably, my mind turns to James Olmstead. Did he act so strangely after Madalyn was found on the sidewalk? I brush the thought away—I’m in social worker mode. It’s a defense mechanism that I’ve had to employ often in my line of work. I wouldn’t have survived for very long if I didn’t become clinical and detached. I want to explain this to the receptionist. I want to tell her that I will not be able to claw my way through this day if I don’t hold my emotions at bay.
    The emergency waiting room is surprisingly busy for a Tuesday morning. Individuals in various degrees of pain and misery surround me. There is an elderly woman knitting what appears to be a baby’s blanket, her knobbed fingers deftly moving, turning out a mosaic of pink, blue, yellow and green. There is a hunched young man carefully cradling his heavily bandaged hand, blood oozing through the gauze. One woman is crying, hiccuping loudly into her phone, pleading with someone on the other side of the line to please not drop her health-care insurance. A small boy of about three toddles over, alternating happily between eating a cracker and sipping juice from a sippy cup. With a smile he holds out a soggy, half-eaten cracker to me as an offering and I take it, pretending to nibble at the edges. His apologetic mother rushes over, sweeps him into her arms and moves to the other side of the waiting room.
    A woman and her two children approach the receptionist’s window. One of my families. I always make a point to acknowledge my clients, but take their lead as to how much interaction we have when we happen to meet by chance. Today, I hope she doesn’t notice me, hope that she doesn’t want to talk about her children, the damage that has been inflicted upon them. But she turns, eyes scanning the waiting room, landing where I am sitting. I smile in her direction and she makes her way over to where I am and sits down across from me. “An earache,” she explains as she protectively pulls her four-year-old onto her lap and reaches out for her nine-year-old daughter’s hand.
    “Those are the worst,” I reply, but we both know this is a lie. The worst was when your boyfriend molested your daughter while you were at work or, for me, when you leave your one-year-old to languish in an oven disguised as a minivan. Nine-year-old Destiny, painfully thin, averts her eyes, pulls away from her mother and busies herself with examining the fish tank in the corner of the room.
    “Excuse me,” I say, standing and holding up my phone to let her know that I am not being rude, that I am not moving to avoid further conversation with her, but that I need to make a call. She nods and her attention returns to her four-year-old son, who is fighting back tears and pulling at his ear. She rubs his back in slow, gentle circles. A good mom with an evil boyfriend.
    The phone in my hand pulses